I started 2016 with a big, but doable reading goal: 100 books by December 31. I set the goal on Goodreads and watched as the little message on the challenge box said I was “on track,” “x books ahead,” or (shudder) “x books behind.” As the year went on, I stopped seeing the “ahead” message, and it became clear that I wouldn’t get there. For the third year in a row, I would fall short.

“I get naked on TV. A lot,” writes Lena Dunham in her bestselling memoir Not That Kind of Girl. Exhibitionism isn’t new to her, she explains; in fact, she rather likes being naked, as her body is “a tool to tell the story”. That story is, of course, her own: a compendium of corporeal confessions, with an emphasis on their most awkward and impolite dimensions, belches and farts, periods and pubic hair. As soon as it arrived on shelves, the book was headline news as Dunham variously apologised for touching her sister’s genitals, for trivialising child abuse, for amending her accounts of college sex. It was publishing gold.

Earlier this month Terrence Rafferty, a longtime film critic, wrote a long, lumpy essay for The Atlantic about the proliferation of excellent women crime writers. Yes, I said lumpy: there is a lot of undigested material in the piece.